3 Acknowledgements The panel would like to thank the wide range of experts who have given advice throughout the project, including Professor Jeff Borland, Professor William Brown, David Coats, Dan Corry, Matt Cowgill, Professor Richard Dickens, Donald Hirsch and Professor David Metcalf. We are grateful for conversations with representatives from the Federation of Small Businesses, the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress, and to those who attended a roundtable to discuss our developing ideas in December The panel s work has been hosted by the Resolution Foundation. Alex Hurrell and Giselle Cory led the analysis of sectors and provided analytical support to the project throughout. Conor D Arcy supported the project and provided an essential contribution to the interim and final report. James Plunkett oversaw the work. The work received the generous support of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, an independent, charitable foundation committed to bringing about socially just change. The Trust provides grants to grassroots community groups and campaigns working in deprived communities in the UK, with a focus on Birmingham and the Black Country. The Trust also works with researchers, think tanks and government, often in partnership with other grant-makers, seeking to overcome the structural barriers to a more just and equal society. 3

4 Expert panel membership Professor Sir George Bain (CHAIR) founding Chair of the Low Pay Commission and former President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen s University Belfast Professor Paul Gregg Professor of Economic and Social Policy and Director of the Centre for Analysis and Social Policy, University of Bath Professor Alan Manning Professor of Economics and former Head of the Economics Department, London School of Economics Dr Abigail McKnight Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics Professor Karen Mumford Professor of Economics at the University of York and Chair of the Royal Economic Society Women s Committee Dr John Philpott Director, The Jobs Economist consultancy James Plunkett Director of Policy and Development, Resolution Foundation Nicola Smith Head of Economic and Social Affairs Department, Trades Union Congress Tony Wilson Director of Policy, Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion 4

5 Chair s Foreword The UK s minimum wage turns fifteen this year. As the chair of the Low Pay Commission that set the first rate, I did not think it would survive this long. In 1999 when the minimum wage became law, the business community was roundly opposed, opponents predicted two million unemployed, and the House of Commons was divided. We felt engaged in an embattled experiment. Today s context could hardly be more different. The minimum wage enjoys broad political support and the academic consensus shows clearly that it boosted earnings without causing unemployment. Low pay itself has changed too. When we started our work fifteen years ago, I remember seeing jobs advertised paying 1 an hour. Such extremes are now all but eliminated. Yet the more general problem of low pay remains. Five million workers in the UK are low paid one in five of the total workforce, a figure that has barely dipped in the last decade and a half. I decided to chair this review because it is time to reflect on what the minimum wage did and did not achieve, and to think about where the policy should go next. The minimum wage was one of the most radical policy interventions of modern times, yet while over one hundred empirical studies have been published to investigate its effects, its design has never been reviewed in the round. Far from protecting the policy, this lack of reflection risks allowing the minimum wage to lose relevance. Indeed, it would be surprising if the settlement built fifteen years ago was right for these different times. For the past nine months I have worked with a panel of leading academic and policy experts, exploring whether there are practical ways in which the minimum wage could be strengthened while crucially not putting at risk what has already been achieved. At the outset of the work, I did not know if this could be done. I now think it can. The judicious reforms we recommend in this report would retain the core of the late 1990s settlement, but strengthen it for new times. 5

6 Not everyone will agree with our proposals. Some will say they ask too much of the minimum wage and the Low Pay Commission. Perhaps more common will be the response that they do not go far enough given the scale of low pay. My own view is that they represent a sensible middle ground, building on the foundations of the minimum wage a broader, more far-sighted and more assertive approach, better equipped to take on today s challenge of low pay. Professor Sir George Bain Chair of the Low Pay Commission, 1997/ /02 and 2008/09 6

7 Executive summary This is the final report of the Resolution Foundation s review of the future of the National Minimum Wage. The review has worked for the past nine months under the chairmanship of Professor Sir George Bain, the founding chair of the Low Pay Commission, exploring whether the minimum wage and its supporting architecture could do more to tackle Britain s pervasive problem of low pay. This report sets out the collective views of the expert panel that has led the work and arises from primary and secondary analysis and conversations with academics, employer organisations and unions. Since we began our work, interest in the minimum wage has grown. The system that was established in 1998 is now more than ever in flux. There is a growing acceptance that the late 1990s settlement that served the policy so well in its first fifteen years falls short of what is now needed. Recent interventions by the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Business and the Low Pay Commission (LPC) itself have suggested the need for a stronger or more ambitious framework for the National Minimum Wage (NMW). But these interventions have so far been ad hoc: they do not amount to a new policy and there has been no official review of the National Minimum Wage and the Low Pay Commission, or what should come next. The purpose of this report is to set out proposals that strengthen the minimum wage more formally, giving the policy renewed relevance in the coming years. Now is the right time to do this work, not least because the basic arguments about the minimum wage are largely settled. As Chapter 1 shows, we now know beyond any reasonable doubt that the minimum wage boosted earnings considerably without causing unemployment. Employers did not simply fire people in response to the minimum wage; they were smarter than this. They adapted through other channels, adjusting profits and pricing strategies, changing pay differentials and, in low paying sectors, boosting productivity. The simple lesson of the last fifteen years is that a successful strategy to tackle low pay will need two pillars: new efforts to raise the productivity of low paid workers, and judicious policies to push employers to pay more where they can afford to, especially in buoyant labour markets. As we show in Chapter 2, the success of the minimum wage owes much to the policy s careful design. The 1998 settlement was intentionally cautious. The Low Pay Commission did not bite off too much; it focused on the narrow, technical (and difficult) task of setting Britain s first minimum wage. It took 7

8 things one step at a time; its overriding concern was to keep the minimum wage alive through its vulnerable infancy and not to worry overly about the long-term. And beyond the NMW it stayed hands-off: its purpose was to eliminate extreme low pay, not to worry about whether employers went beyond this legal obligation or to be concerned about the wider incidence of low pay. This reflected in part the government s wider economic strategy, in which other tools, notably tax credits, were used aggressively to address the wider issues of low earnings and incomes. Today s world is different in fundamental ways: the minimum wage has widespread support; there is a deep evidence-base; low pay itself has changed; and this government and the next one are likely to be severely constrained by fiscal pressures. As a result, some of the minimum wage s initial strengths are now weaknesses. Three stand out when we assess the settlement afresh in First, the LPC s work, and the government s wider work on low pay, is simply too narrow. The LPC is better described as a Minimum Wage Commission; it has never been asked to even measure low pay. This focus made sense in the late 1990s, when a third of low paid workers were in extreme low pay. But more than nine in ten low paid workers (91 per cent) now earn between the minimum wage and the 7.71 low pay threshold two-thirds of the median hourly wage - putting them in effect out of the reach of today s settlement. This limitation is not just a feature of the LPC s remit: it reflects the lack of any wider strategy to tackle low pay under current and previous governments. Second, the LPC s one-step-at-a-time process for setting the minimum wage now seems too short-sighted. Most immediately, this short-sightedness creates uncertainty for employers. The NMW is announced barely six months before it comes into force. More fundamentally, the minimum wage as a whole lacks direction. In its effort to keep politics out of the NMW, the government has fallen into a strange neutrality about the minimum wage: there is no official preference over whether it rises or falls. This leaves the policy rudderless. The LPC is only asked to describe the labour market as it sees it today, not to advise the government on how to make a higher minimum wage possible. Ad hoc political interventions to encourage a higher NMW are one result of this formal lack of direction. Third, the LPC s focus on extreme low pay is too restricted, inadvertently leaving the body concerned only that employers pay the minimum wage plus a penny. In the late 1990s, this was not anticipated to be a problem; it was widely thought that the effects of the minimum wage would ripple upwards naturally. On the contrary, the minimum wage has become the going rate in some sectors eight per cent of employees now earn within 25 pence of the 8

9 NMW with employers often feeling no pressure to pay more. This in part reflects the powers that were given to the LPC, which has only the blunt tool of a single mandatory NMW at its disposal. It has neither the power nor the responsibility to incentivise employers to go further even when they could afford to do so. And it has no role in informing an important public debate about what might be possible, even when there is evidence that large parts of the UK economy could pay more. When we embarked on our review, we did not know if these weaknesses could be fixed without breaking the current system. After nine months of research, consultation and deliberation, we now think they can. We can say this because our recommendations retain the fundamentals of today s settlement but they also build on it in important ways. Our recommendations cover three areas, arguing for a broader, more far-sighted and assertive approach. First, we need a broader approach. We therefore recommend that the government make it an explicit long-term ambition of economic policy to reduce the incidence of low pay, setting out a plan to reduce the share of employees who earn below two-thirds of the hourly median wage. We suggest that the government adopt the ambitious but achievable long-term goal of reducing the UK s high incidence of low pay from 21 per cent to 17 per cent, a reasonable goal against international benchmarks. This would entail lifting around 1 million employees out of low pay. To complement this ambition, we recommend that the LPC s Terms of Reference be revised to broaden and elevate the body into the government s official watchdog on low pay, monitoring and pushing progress in the manner of the Office for Budget Responsibility on fiscal policy. Second, we need to make the minimum wage more far-sighted. Here we recommend that the process for setting the rate be reformed in several respects. We make two recommendations to increase clarity. In the short-term, the Secretary of State for Business should ask the LPC to set out how long it will now take for the National Minimum Wage to recover the value it has lost in real terms during the exceptional down-turn we have recently experienced. This is a short-term fix to an immediate and unprecedented problem, but setting out a recovery path of this kind should also become standard practice whenever the NMW falls in real terms, as it sometimes will. And to give business more certainty, we recommend that the LPC be asked to publish alongside its recommendation for each year s minimum wage a preliminary view on its intention for the following year s minimum wage. 9

10 More fundamentally, the minimum wage should strike a better balance between short-term flexibility and medium-term ambition. To achieve this, we recommend a change in the government s relationship with the LPC. To the former, we recommend that government routinely set out its views on how the NMW can contribute to its wider goal of reducing the incidence of low pay. This should be done by publishing an ambition for the level of the minimum wage expressed as a proportion of the median wage that could be attainable over the medium term (e.g., five years). This would clarify expectations about the role of the minimum wage, as well as its clear limits. Our view, based on UK and international evidence, is that a wage-floor worth 60 per cent of the median wage is a reasonable lodestar, indicating the most that a minimum wage could contribute to the goal of reducing low pay over the medium to long term. Turning to the LPC, we recommend that it should retain its role of recommending the NMW that can safely be put in place at any point in time. This flexibility is a cornerstone of the current model. But the LPC s Terms of Reference should be amended to support the government s objective. To this end, the LPC should be required to publish not only its recommendation for the NMW but also (a) an assessment of the extent to which this recommendation differs from the trajectory aspired to by the government; and (b) where the recommendation falls short, advice to the government on the blockages to a higher rate and policy actions that could make a higher rate possible. This should include work to identify those sectors of the economy that could in theory already pay the higher rate today and the small handful of sectors that face major barriers and that will require more fundamental support. It should be a goal of policy to make a higher NMW possible, for example by delivering more adequate and responsive funding in social care and a lower burden of employer taxes on small employers. Third, because a single legal wage-floor which we favour will always be a blunt tool, a key role for the LPC should be to encourage a debate over when employers could go further than today s statutory NMW. The proper arena for this debate is civil society, not Whitehall, but the state can help shift the terms of debate, in part by publishing information. Our analysis suggests that industrial sectors are a good way to start. The Secretary of State for Business should ask the LPC to publish analysis to show which sectors of the economy could afford to pay more than its recommended NMW. Whatever its value, many employers will be able to go further than the legal NMW. The LPC s authority should be brought to bear behind this argument. Finally, we believe that a similar case can be made for London. While we oppose the idea of regional minimum wages, in the capital we feel there is 10

11 a case for moving directly to the publication of a single reference rate a non-mandatory minimum wage giving in effect a London-weighting for the NMW. The Secretary of State for Business should ask the LPC to carry out a review of the wage-floor that could be applied in London without significant negative employment effects. This figure should be published as a non-mandatory reference rate, released annually to inform wage negotiators, campaigners and public debate. Together these recommendations would mean a broader, more far-sighted and more assertive settlement, but they retain the fundamental principles of the agreement struck in There must still be a single mandatory NMW that is recommended from year to year by the independent and evidencebased social partnership model of the LPC. Indeed, as insecurity has grown in Britain s low paid labour market, a single, clear, mandatory NMW is more important than ever. For this reason, we have rejected ideas that would fundamentally break with this approach. We do not recommend regionalising the minimum wage or introducing mandatory sector minimum wages. Nor do we propose raising the minimum wage to the Living Wage or indexing it to the rate of inflation. We want more balance between flexibility and medium-term ambition and we do not want to over steer. In taking this overall approach, we diverge from two schools of thought that we have encountered in the course of our work. One of these contends that any change to the status quo runs the risk of breaking the minimum wage. We disagree: the evidence-base is strong enough, and indeed the reputation of the LPC is robust enough, to sustain a stronger version of the established settlement. The model designed fifteen years ago was never going to be perfect for all times, and we do not serve that settlement well by preserving it in aspic. The other school of thought argues for more radical changes to the minimum wage to tackle Britain s pervasive problem of low pay. We sympathise with this instinct. But we also think it would be foolhardy to jeopardise an institution like the LPC without first seeing what a stronger version of that body can do. The LPC has proven its worth and is the envy of many countries. Britain does not have many authoritative and evidence-based institutions that have forged cross-party political support. Those we have should be sustained. 11

12 Summary of our recommendations Argument I The government should make it an explicit long-term ambition of economic policy to reduce the incidence and persistence of low pay in the UK labour market, and it should broaden and elevate the Low Pay Commission to be its main watchdog on low pay, monitoring and advising on the issue in a similar manner to the OBR on fiscal policy. Recommendation 1: The government should commit to reducing the share of employees who earn below two-thirds of the hourly median wage. An ambitious but achievable long-term goal, based on international benchmarks, would be to reduce the share of low pay in the UK economy from 21 per cent to 17 per cent of employees. Recommendation 2: The government should set out a practical crossgovernment plan to deliver on its ambition to reduce the incidence of low pay. This should include but not be limited to its judgment of what the National Minimum Wage can and cannot contribute (see Recommendation 6). Recommendation 3: The Low Pay Commission s permanent Terms of Reference should be revised to establish it as the government s main watchdog on low pay, broadening its responsibilities and elevating its status to monitor the extent and persistence of low pay and to advise the government on how to tackle these entrenched problems. Argument II The process for setting the National Minimum Wage should be reformed to strike a more even balance between short-term flexibility and medium-term ambition. The goal should be to give more clarity and drive to the NMW in the medium-term, while retaining the LPC s vital role in recommending the rate from year to year. To bring more clarity to the minimum wage in the short-term: Recommendation 4: The Secretary of State for Business should ask the LPC to publish its best estimate of how long it will now take for the National Minimum Wage to recover the value it has lost in real terms in recent years. It should become standard practice for the LPC to publish a recovery path of this kind whenever it is in the unusual position of recommending a real terms cut in the NMW. 12

13 Recommendation 5: The LPC currently submits its recommendation for the NMW in February and the government announces in March or April the rate that will apply from October, giving barely six months between the announcement and the rate becoming law. To increase certainty for employers, the LPC should also be asked to set out a preliminary intention for the subsequent year. This judgment would be open to revision. To better balance the NMW s short-term flexibility with medium-term ambition: Recommendation 6: The government should, as a matter of routine, set out its ambitions for the future value of the minimum wage. This should be no more than an expression of intent, leaving the LPC free to pass judgment on the NMW that can be put in place from year to year. This ambition would best be expressed as a proportion of the median wage to be achieved over the medium-term. It would need to be arrived at by the government through an evidence-based assessment of what is possible but our early work suggests that a NMW of 60 per cent of the median wage is a reasonable lodestar, indicating the most that a minimum wage could contribute to the reduction of low pay over the medium- to long-term. Recommendation 7: The LPC s permanent Terms of Reference should be amended to require that the LPC publish, alongside its recommendation for the NMW (a) an assessment of the extent to which its recommendation meets or falls short of the trajectory aspired to by the government; and (b) where its recommendation falls short, a commentary on the blockages to a higher rate and advice on policy changes that could make a higher rate possible in future. This should include an assessment of how close different sectors of the UK economy are to being able to pay the government s aspirational NMW today. Argument III A single mandatory NMW will always be a blunt tool and there is a risk that the minimum wage becomes a going rate as employers feel little pressure to go beyond their legal obligation. The LPC should be given additional tools to complement the legal NMW, publishing analysis to indicate which parts of the UK economy could afford to pay their lowest paid workers more. Recommendation 8: Many sectors of the UK economy could afford to pay more than the NMW. This is inevitable with any single national wage-floor, whatever its rate. A key role of the LPC should be to inform public debate over when employers could go further than the NMW. The Secretary of State should ask the LPC to publish analysis to inform this debate, showing how affordable it would be in different sectors to meet a higher wage-floor. 13

14 Recommendation 9: The Secretary of State for Business should ask the LPC to carry out a review of the wage-floor that could be applied in London without significant negative employment effects. The LPC should publish this figure as a non-mandatory reference rate to guide the behaviour of employers Scope and Outline of the Paper This report focuses on the design of the minimum wage and its supporting policy architecture, the Low Pay Commission. To that end, we have not looked in detail at enforcement, except where enforcement has a bearing on policy design. Enforcement is nonetheless a foundation for the NMW s success and should not be taken for granted. It is also not our intention in this report to look at low pay more generally. Low pay is a far broader problem than the NMW, being driven by a wide range of factors including the productivity and skills of low paid workers and collective bargaining arrangements. We recognise that the minimum wage is a limited-purpose vehicle and only one element of any strategy to combat low pay. In Section 1 of this paper we summarise the lessons learned during the NMW s first fifteen years. Chapter 1 outlines the evidence on the impact of the NMW to date, focusing on its effects on wages and employment. Chapter 2 evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the current settlement, identifying the aspects of the approach that must be retained and those that are in need of reform. In Section 2 of the paper we make three broad arguments for a stronger and more confident settlement that more closely measures up to today s challenge of low pay. Chapter 3 considers how the narrowness of the policy s scope holds it back from tackling the wider issue of low pay. It contrasts the current arrangement with the remit of a more genuine Low Pay Commission, making recommendations to broaden the approach. Chapter 4 looks at the short-termism of the NMW. It makes recommendations that strike a more even balance between short-term flexibility and medium-term ambition. Chapter 5 looks at how the LPC could be equipped with additional tools to complement the powerful but blunt tool of a single mandatory NMW. The Conclusion touches on the risks and rewards of our recommended approach. 14

15 Section 1 LESSONS LEARNED 15

16 Chapter 1 Evidence on impacts This chapter begins by outlining the evidence on the impact of the National Minimum Wage (NMW). It focuses on the two most important questions for any evaluation of a minimum wage: what impact did the policy have on the earnings of the lowest paid; and were there any effects on employment? As well as summarising the evidence on earnings and employment, this chapter also reflects on the important question of why the NMW did not impact on employment. Overview of the policy The NMW was eased in and then increased quickly before slowing down The introduction of the National Minimum Wage was a fiercely fought battle. But the hardest decision still lay ahead when the National Minimum Wage Act received royal assent in Setting the rate (initially covering all employees aged 22 and over, with lower rates for younger people) was a daunting proposition. As The Economist wrote in 1997, coming up with a minimum wage that will not seriously harm the economy, and destroy jobs, will require the wisdom of Solomon or extraordinary luck. 1 The rate also had to be set sufficiently high to have a meaningful effect on earnings. Box 1: Does a higher minimum wage raise household incomes? Low pay is only one aspect of the wider question of household incomes and living standards. A stronger minimum wage is not the only way to raise household incomes and indeed the relationship between the two is more complicated than is commonly realised. There are well-formed arguments for why wages can have a limited impact on the incomes of certain households.* The flip-side of this argument is the likely savings to government from a higher minimum wage in reduced benefit spending and increased tax revenues, though these too are complicated to calculate. An increase in the minimum wage will not filter through equally for all households. The size of that gain will depend on interactions between National Insurance contributions, income tax and tax credits. The introduction of Universal Credit complicates matters further. Case studies can help us understand the proportion of a 10p increase in the NMW which is passed on to household income: A single person in their twenties who lives with their parents and works part-time at the NMW would keep all of any increase in the minimum wage, assuming they earned below the thresholds for National Insurance and income tax and received no state support. A single parent working full-time at the NMW fares less well, with a net benefit of just over a quarter of the rise (2.7 pence). This is the result of lost tax credits in addition to direct taxes. A second earner in a couple with children working full-time at the NMW will also receive 1 The minimum wage: Devilish details The Economist (5th June 1997) 16

17 2.7 pence as a result of a 10 pence increase in the minimum wage. However, when Universal Credit is introduced, that will fall to 2.4 pence, highlighting the lower work incentives faced by second earners. * Bennett, F. and Lister, R. The Living Wage : The right answer to low pay? The Low Pay Commission (LPC) was created to meet this challenge. Formed on the basis of a social partnership model, the LPC is made up of nine members: three from a trade union background, three from an employer perspective and three independent members, including two academics usually with expertise in industrial relations or labour market economics, and the Chair. Its primary role was to recommend a rate for the very first NMW to the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, today s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. Despite the potential for disagreement among the Commissioners, the LPC has always reached a unanimous decision on their recommendation for the rate. The Secretary of State retains the power to disregard the LPC s recommendation on the NMW but none has ever done so, with ministers diverging from the LPC s broader advice only twice: on the rate paid to apprentices, and the age at which the adult rate should begin. Figure 1 tracks the path which the NMW has taken. Partly due to the controversy surrounding the introduction of the NMW and the uncertainty over its effects, the UK s first rate was set at a low level, at 3.60 from April The LPC was asked to monitor the impact of the NMW and offer advice on whether and by how much the NMW should increase. The first increase was similarly circumspect, with the rate rising by only 10p in October While the largest nominal increase occurred in 2001, with a jump to 4.10, it was the mid-2000s which saw the NMW experience its fastest and most sustained growth, rising by at least 30p each year between 2003 and 2006, equivalent to average annual increases of more than 6 per cent. The speed at which the NMW rose slowed considerably from 2007 onwards with small nominal increases in subsequent years reflecting the difficult prevailing conditions in the wider economy. Only in 2014, following five years of decline in real terms, is the NMW set to rise again, with the Chair of the LPC writing to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to recommend a rise in October 2014 of 3 per cent to 6.50, and pointing to the likelihood of further real terms increases in subsequent years. The Prime Minister has indicated that the government will accept the recommendation for What impact did the NMW have at these levels? The LPC s terms of reference ask it to recommend levels for the minimum wage rates that help as many low-paid workers as possible without any significant adverse impact on employment or the economy. In the following section, we summarise the best evidence on whether this was achieved, outlining the research on the effects on the NMW on wages, employment and other variables. 17

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March 2012 In this newsletter, we focus on the U.S. job market. The economic recovery post-2008 is often referred to as a "jobless recovery" given the persistently high unemployment rate. In this paper

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Foreword The End of Cycle Report is our most comprehensive analysis to date of recruitment to full time undergraduate courses in the UK. It provides a rich picture of demand and outcomes for higher education

Glenn Stevens: The path to prosperity Address by Mr Glenn Stevens, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, at the 2015 Economic and Social Outlook Conference, organized by The Melbourne Institute and